Avik Roy: Six Months Needed to Fix Obamacare Website

Access to the Affordable Care Act website could take another six months to straighten out, says Avik Roy, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributor to Forbes.com.

"There's so many problems with this website. I would be very surprised if it was functional before the spring," Roy told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.

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"Everything is wrong with the underlying architecture of the system: the difficulty of interacting with the IRS data so they can figure out whether or not you're manipulating your income; the difficulty of interacting with the insurers so the insurers ... [have] accurate information about who enrolled.

"It's just a complete mess, and they just have to stop and rebuild it from scratch, and they don't want to do that. So, we'll see what happens."

Roy said he is struck by White House Press Secretary Jay Carney's ongoing claim that only five percent of Americans are affected by the healthcare law's regulations that prevent them from keeping their existing plans.

"That's not true," Roy said.

"First of all, Obamacare forces a lot of people with employer-sponsored coverage [out of their plan]," he said. "I estimated that the total number of employer-sponsored and individual persons is 93 million, while my colleagues estimate that it's 125 million. It's a big, big number."